Daily Times

Unmoored from reason or shame and buoyed by its willingness to be as silly as it wants to be, the new ABC drama ‘Reef Break’ is a wildly unserious piece of television. In that, it is a bit refreshing – a network series that embraces its network-iness, that has absolutely no ambition beyond evoking a smile. ‘Reef Break’, about a thief-turned-fixer who finds herself involved in fighting crime on a Pacific idyll, is not particularly distinguished, but as an example of a particular sort of television-making, it’s better-done than it might be. The series’s cold open is emblematic. Flying into a small Hawaiian island, Cat Chambers susses out the flight’s air marshal. Once the plane has landed, she tells him that a fellow passenger is armed and has an open wound bleeding through his shirt; she suspects he committed an armed robbery before the flight.